Phyllis Wong and the Return of the Conjuror

by Geoffrey McSkimming

  ‘What got into her?’ Barry asked as they turned the corner. ‘I’ve never seen her behave like that before.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. She must’ve smelt something . . . or heard something . . .’

  ‘It’s lucky you got her away from that woman like you did. Otherwise things might’ve got nasty.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He sighed. ‘Oh, heavens. I won’t be able to show my face at Wendlebury’s any time soon. No siree. I only hope that that Siiimon didn’t see what happened. He’d have me banned, for sure.’

  ‘Sorry for all that, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Ah, well. These things happen. No real damage done, was there?’

  ‘I hope you don’t get into trouble,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Now, trouble, Miss Wong, is what I’m paid to deal with. It is my dance partner in the ballroom of life, as it were. If there is any trouble—’ He stopped walking and looked at her. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? You’re shaking and . . . good lord . . . you’re as white as a sheet!’

  ‘I think I need to sit down somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, you do. C’mon, there’s an excellent café on the next block. The best chocolate sundaes you’ve never yet tasted. My treat.’

  Phyllis nodded. ‘Sounds good.’

  He led her along the street, keeping a watchful eye on her as she walked. From the way she looked, he thought she appeared to be in a sort of daze, or perhaps the onset of some kind of fever.

  Something had shaken Phyllis Wong, but she wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

  Uncertain

  Late that night, after Minette had returned from her gig at the Baubles of Baalbek Nightclub and Chief Inspector Barry Inglis had deposited Phyllis back with her, Phyllis lay in bed in Minette’s guest bedroom with Daisy curled up by her side on top of the blankets. Phyllis was as wide awake as the moment she had been born.

  Something was wrong. Phyllis could feel it. Something about what had happened at the auction wasn’t right.

  She’d seen something, in the blur of seconds when Daisy had leapt from her bag and attacked the curly-haired woman. Something that jolted the young conjuror. But, in those frenzied seconds of Daisy barking wildly at the woman and people jumping up to get out of the way and Barry hurrying to help get Daisy back into Phyllis’s bag, whatever it was that Phyllis had seen had blurred in her mind.

  She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. She tried to visualise the scene again: how the woman recoiled; how Daisy attacked furiously at the woman’s ruffled collar; how the woman had screamed to get Daisy away from her and had covered her face with her hands.

  . . . how she had covered her face with her hands . . .

  Phyllis opened her eyes suddenly as the image of the woman’s rings speared into her memory. She recalled seeing the flashes of brightness from the gemstones—the brilliant white diamonds and the big, glowing green garnets. They were far brighter than the rubies and emeralds and other precious stones. Especially . . .

  . . . the green! Suddenly Phyllis saw the scene again, as fresh as if it were happening all over right in front of her. Only this time she realised she’d seen something different to what she thought she’d seen at the auction. It hadn’t been the green garnets in the woman’s rings that had glowed at Phyllis. It had been the woman’s eyes.

  The woman’s eyes had been glowing green!

  A chill went through Phyllis, from her fringe to her toenails. She took a deep breath as the realisation dawned on her.

  She knew how the First Folios were appearing, all of a sudden, here in the twenty-first century. The woman sitting by her in the aisle at The House of Wendlebury’s was a fellow Transiter!

  Phyllis’s heart was beating quickly, and a surge of wonderment oscillated up and down her spine.

  It was strange knowing this. She was feeling a mixture of emotions about it all. Firstly, she was excited that she had met—or, to be accurate, not quite met—another like herself. There was something a bit comforting in that, knowing that another Transiter was around. This didn’t completely surprise Phyllis, of course; W.W. had told her that there were other Transiters . . . what had he called them? Yes, that was it: fellow wayfarers. Others who had stumbled upon the Pockets. And the woman in the dark clothes with the long curly hair was clearly one of them.

  Secondly, even though Phyllis felt excited about the woman, she was also uneasy about her. Something felt not quite right about what the woman was doing. If she were Transiting back to 1623 and getting the First Folios—twelve of them, if all the Folios that Barry Inglis had found out about had indeed been brought back by her—well, was that wrong?

  It was wrong if the woman was stealing them, but was she stealing them? Maybe she was buying them, and then selling them again, in the here and now . . .

  Phyllis bit her lip. She was feeling butterflies of uncertainty in her tummy. She just didn’t know . . .

  Something W.W. had said to her flashed into her mind: Some use the Pockets for procurement, Phyllis . . . some misuse the Pockets of Time . . .

  She felt that the woman with the dark curly hair was up to something fishy. Something sneaky. How bad or wrong that thing was, Phyllis wasn’t sure. But she felt she needed to find out more . . .

  Phyllis lay awake for a long time, wondering. And during this time, it was as if the two feelings she had—the excitement and the uneasiness—were having a little tug-of-war inside her.

  She felt alone (apart from having Daisy by her side). She couldn’t tell Barry Inglis what she knew, or what she suspected; her great-grandfather had told her to try, as far as possible, to safekeep the secret of Transiting. Besides, Phyllis knew that the Chief Inspector was a down-to-earth, no-surprises-around-the-corner sort of man. Chances are, even if she were to tell him about her secret, he’d never believe her.

  Phyllis turned over, and Daisy roused, opening one eye and checking that her friend was all right. When she was sure Phyllis wasn’t going to get out of bed, the terrier stood, turned around three times and lay down again, curling herself snugly against Phyllis’s back.

  Dad’ll be home tomorrow, Phyllis thought as her feelings pulled and tugged at her. I’ll talk to him. Maybe he can help . . .

  Harvey Wong arrived home the next morning, and Phyllis was mighty pleased to see him. She was always glad when he was safely back from a trip.

  At lunch, Phyllis asked him, ‘Dad? You know in business? Is it wrong if someone’s buying something up and then selling it for a huge profit?’

  Harvey smiled. ‘Ah. You are considering becoming a businesswoman, then?’

  Phyllis shook her head. ‘Only if magic is business,’ she said before taking a bite of her sandwich.

  ‘It’s show business,’ said Harvey Wong.

  ‘Yeah, but in big business—like your sort of business—is it wrong to make huge profits quickly?’

  Harvey chewed his sandwich and thought. ‘That depends,’ he replied. ‘It depends on how the property was acquired.’

  ‘Huh?’ Phyllis slipped a tiny bit of crust down to Daisy who was waiting patiently on the black-and-white tiled floor of their kitchen.

  ‘Don’t feed the four-paws at the table,’ said Harvey.

  ‘Sorry. How does it depend?’

  ‘Well, say for example that someone bought something and swindled the people from whom he was buying it. Say that he offered them a ridiculously low amount and they accepted the offer. Then say he onsold the property for a whopping profit, and that the people he’d swindled were hurt by his dealings. I’d consider that wrong.’

  ‘Could he be arrested for that?’

  ‘In some circumstances, I suppose he could. If it could be proved that he hoodwinked the sellers, perhaps. That he tricked them into selling. But sadly in most cases the law couldn’t touch him. It’s wrong, yes, but not illegal. But wrong it is. I think it’s morally bad.’

  Phyllis listened carefully.

  ‘To hurt people in business is not good, my girl. It shoul
d not be done. But, sadly, all too often it is done. Greed is a goddess for many people; their greatest desire is to make money and more money, and they don’t care whom they hurt or exploit on the way.

  ‘Sometimes people do it on the share market, also. They call it “insider trading” when someone trades huge amounts of stocks and shares for enormous profits because they have information about those stocks and bonds that is not public. That is illegal, and people go to jail for insider trading.’

  ‘So it’s like stealing?’ asked Phyllis.

  ‘Yes,’ said Harvey. ‘It is.’

  Phyllis stopped eating. She knew what she had to do. She had to find out if the curly-haired woman was stealing the Folios from somewhere in Time. She had to discover how the woman was getting them.

  It was time to use the Pockets.

  Plans upheaved

  At the Millennium Hotel, a small, expensive hotel on the Upper River Side of the city, the curly-haired woman hurried into the lobby, pushing the entrance doors so hard that they almost knocked down a man who was about to leave the building.

  She rushed through the foyer, and the receptionist, busy organising the next morning’s breakfast orders, looked up. ‘Ms Colley,’ he said, ‘is everything all right?’

  She glared at him but didn’t stop, clutching the collar of her fur-lined coat tightly around her neck as she headed for the elevator. ‘Do NOT speak to me!’ she hissed. ‘NEVER speak to me unless I speak to you first!’

  The receptionist gave a small gasp—not because of her rudeness, which he was used to, but because of her eyes—and he dropped the breakfast order cards onto the desk.

  The woman jabbed her finger on the elevator button. Almost immediately the doors slid open and she entered, jabbing another button inside to close the doors swiftly. The elevator rose silently to the fifth floor.

  She strode out and unlocked the door to her suite of rooms, quickly went in and slammed the door behind her. She undid the buttons of her coat and carefully reached into the mink fur of the coat’s collar. Her fingers felt warmth, and she withdrew her small friend from the fur and set her down on one of the plush sofas in the centre of the sitting room.

  ‘Everything,’ said Vesta Colley to the small, red-eyed white rat, ‘is calm again, my dear Glory.’

  Glory—for that is what she had christened the rat when she had found her in a dingy street in London nearly four hundred years ago—looked up at her. The rodent twitched her white whiskers and made a tiny sound. ‘Squeeeetch.’

  Vesta Colley took off her coat and threw it onto a chair. She reached up and tousled her hair, letting the curls billow out fully, as though she were trying to free herself from the memory of what had happened at The House of Wendlebury’s. She shook her head and undid her lace collar. ‘That confounded dog. It had no place there. It could have taken you out, my dear Glory. It could have seen the end of your days . . .’

  Glory started grooming her tiny paws, her tongue making a snik-snitchering sound as it darted up and down across the fur.

  ‘But at least we sold the book. Again.’ Vesta Colley sat on the sofa next to Glory, and started unlacing one of her long black boots. ‘Another First Folio,’ she said, a curl of satisfaction creeping into her low voice. ‘Another fine First Folio for the modern world of fools . . .’

  She took off the boot and started unlacing the other one. She was halfway through when she stopped, her face clouding. ‘But something’s going on,’ she said, more to herself than to Glory. ‘That man was there again, that sandy-haired man in the blue suit. Always the same blue suit, he wears. A fellow of fine appearance, Glory. A handsome man. Bright blue eyes, constantly looking around. He was there with that wretched girl who brought the dog. Why does he come, every time we sell the books? Why does he come, yet never he bids? Always the watcher, never the buyer . . .’

  Her eyes glowed brighter, greener, as she went back to unlacing the boot. She was a slender, strong-featured woman, tall and with an intelligent face. Her eyes, when they were not afflicted with the Transiter’s Green, were a hazel colour and keenly observant. One of her eyes was set a little lower than the other, and it had a slightly droopy eyelid, and from that eye she didn’t have perfect vision. But this didn’t make her look sleepy or stupid; quite the opposite—it suggested that she knew secrets. That there were a lot of things she was aware of that others were not. That she had a cache of valuable knowledge inside her head.

  Which was entirely true.

  Vesta Colley knew much. But it wasn’t the hunger for knowledge that propelled her through her life and her Transits, or the desire to learn or to discover new things. It was a hunger of a different sort. It was the hunger of greed.

  She removed the boot and placed it neatly side by side with its mate. ‘Methinks,’ she uttered, ‘that the man in the blue suit is onto us. Methinks he might be suspicious of our little enterprise. Maybe he is trying to uncover our plan . . .’

  She stood and went to a table in the corner that was arranged with bottles of expensive drinks. She took the cork from one of the bottles—a fifty-year-old bottle of whisky—and poured some of the deep amber-coloured liquid into a crystal glass. This she held up to the light, swirling the whisky around inside it.

  Slowly the green in her eyes started to fade, and their natural hazel colour began to strengthen.

  ‘It is perhaps time for us to stop bringing any more First Folios into this world, Glory my love. Otherwise it might not be only the wretched dog that will be smelling a rat . . .’

  Glory scuttled up onto the back of the sofa and ran along it to be closer to her mistress.

  ‘No,’ said Vesta Colley, still looking at her drink. ‘Methinks that shall be the end of the First Folios. It was starting to get too easy, anyway. No, my dear little skitterer, we shall bring forth something much greater than those. Something far more rare and valuable. Something that will net us more money than even I have imagined possible. Then I shall retire, for I am growing weary of the Transits.’

  She stopped swirling the drink and held the glass still, looking up at it and feeling a tingle of new amazement as this fresh, bold plan began to emerge in her mind.

  ‘And I know just the very thing to bring forth,’ she murmured. ‘Something that the world has hoped for, but has never expected. Something, as that auctioneer said, that is almost legendary!’

  Slowly her lips curled into a sneer—a thin, hard sneer infused with a deep hatred and a rising surge of cruelty. ‘Furthermore, I believe it is time to enact my final burst of destruction. To bring down the very place whence these things came . . . to put an end to the mindless frivolity that the people waste so much of their lives on. To make my ultimate, anonymous ripple on the wretched tide of History!’

  Her eyes gleamed as a smile of unimagined possibilities spread across her face. She lifted the glass higher and toasted: ‘To legends, and those bold enough to seek them out!’

  Then, in a single gulp, she drained the glass.

  A scrap to go on

  Phyllis decided that she would Transit back to Shakespeare’s time and try to visit the printers of the First Folios. From there, she hoped, she would be able to trace the trail of the valuable volumes.

  First, though, she needed to find something from London in the early 1600s. A sort of guiding signal, W.W. had called it. A ‘passport’.

  But where could she find something that had come from London, almost four hundred years ago? There was an obvious place where she could start her search: Mrs Lowerblast’s Antiques & Collectables Emporium, downstairs. Mrs Lowerblast had so much old stuff down there, crammed into every nook and cranny, that there was an excellent chance she’d have something Phyllis needed.

  Phyllis smiled, but almost immediately her smile evaporated: she remembered that Mrs Lowerblast was away for a month—she’d gone to Italy on one of her annual antiques-buying expeditions, and her shop was closed for the duration. So much for that idea, Phyllis sighed.

  But then ano
ther idea came to her. She had something no one else had: the magic basement. She figured that maybe—if she was lucky—there might be something down there from all that time ago that W.W. had collected in his Transits. After all, he’d had the old scarab he’d used to take her back to Egypt, hadn’t he? And that had been stored in the basement.

  She spent almost an entire Saturday looking down there. While Daisy snoozed on one of the sofas, Phyllis went through every shelf, every drawer in every cupboard, every box and basket and skip and trunk and chest. She found new (old) magic props she hadn’t known were there, tucked away in some of the gloomy corners, or hidden and forgotten at the backs of drawers. She could easily identify the magic props—with her experience, she could spot a piece of stage apparatus a mile off—but she couldn’t seem to find anything that even remotely looked like it might have come from seventeenth-century England.

  She went through all the racks of costumes, all the cloaks and Oriental-style gowns and W.W.’s tuxedos and capes and his assistants’ outfits—everything ranging from slave girls’ spangly harem attire to realistic gorilla get-ups, some of which were looking a little moth-eaten and the worse for wear. She pottered about amongst the hats and headwear: top hats, turbans, feathered headdresses, pith helmets, cone-shaped clowns’ hats, fezzes, fake crowns and tiaras glittering with paste jewels. But here also there was nothing that hinted of the right Time and place.

  Phyllis went and sat next to Daisy and pondered. The problem, she thought, is that even if any of this stuff does come from a long time ago, I’m not sure when it comes from and I’m not sure where. And there’s nothing that looks right. She reasoned that if she were to accidentally choose the wrong thing, she might end up anywhere.

  She was sitting there, frowning about it all, when her cell phone rang. She flipped it out of her coat pocket and saw Clem’s face on the identification screen—he was wearing a rubber pointy nose and crepe hair eyebrows which were bushier than a bird’s nest.